And saying "returns an array" just tells me "this person is clueless about
Perl, and has cargo-culted this phrase from some other clueless person".
Your accusations of cluelessness and cargo-culting when other people's
views differ from your own is very tiresome. Just for fun here are a couple
of references to 'returning arrays' (or semantically equivelant phrasing)
from such 'clueless cargo-culters':
CGI.pm: in perl 5.8.2 (author: Lincoln Stein)
In an array context, upload() will return an array of filehandles.
CPAN.pm: in perl 5.8.2 (author: Andreas Koenig)
# returns an array of arrays, the latter contain (size,mtime,filen
+ame)
#-> sub CPAN::Author::dir_listing ;
threads.pm: in perl 5.8.2 (author: Arthur Bergman)
The context (scalar or list) of the thread creation is also the co
+ntext
for join(). This means that if you intend to return an array from
+ a
thread, you must use C<my ($thread) = threads->new(...)>, and that
+ if
you intend to return a scalar, you must use C<my $thread = ...>.
UnixReview: col05.html (Nov 95) (author: Randal L. Schwartz)
In this case, if the subroutine is being invoked in an array context
(assigned to an array, for example), the builtin value ``wantarray''
+ is
true, and the @sums array is returned.